Logitech Hub and Android TV in the IoT

The Internet of Things is one of the hottest buzzwords in technology right now. It stems from a simple idea: what if everything was connected to the Internet and could interact with each other? Your curtains rise in the morning and your coffee maker starts brewing. Your curtains close, lights turn off, thermostat drops the temperature, and your alarm system is secured at night. Everything happens seamlessly.

Right now a lot of these devices have phone apps. Your phone is with you everywhere, and so that makes sense as a controller. Yet there’s another compelling screen: your TV. It is the central hub in houses and has been slowly becoming a family computer. Android TV has been hinted in the past to integrate deeply with the rest of Google’s IoT platforms: Brillo and Weave.

The video above shows a demo from Logitech’s upcoming TV app, which integrates with the Logitech Hub. In it, the host shows the connected devices in his home: a Blu-Ray player, a bluetooth soundbar, a Philips Hue lightbulb, and Hunter Douglas blinds.

The demo starts off rather simple. He goes to the app menu and chooses the “Blinds Open” icon and the blinds start to open.

Soon the host shows off some cool macros. Several actions are tied together into a single option. By choosing the “Movie Night”, the shades go down, the lightbulb turns off, the soundbar activates, and the TV switches to the Blu-Ray player.

There’s still a lot unknown about this app, which is scheduled to be launched in mid-2016. From the video, it appears that each action is exported as an app, which could quickly create bloat on your TV’s app drawer. Hopefully there’ll be support for voice controls as well. Additionally, it is unknown whether it will be exclusive to Sony TVs. Sony may be doing something specific to show these actions which will make it unavailable for other Android TV devices.

The Logitech Hub is already available to purchase for $100, and the software will likely continue to improve and support more devices.

Either way, it’s great to see some development in the Internet of Things field that will allow for better user experiences.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.

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Already doing this with a phone, voice controls, etc via SmartThings hub. Smartthings also integrates with the Logitech Harmony Hub to use everything it can control. Looks like we need to push Smartthings to bring an app to AndroidTV or maybe even the developer of Sharptools 😉